#kiriwrites

Elidibus knows better than to wander about at night. He knows and yet he does—listening, searching, praying—in hopes that his God will see him and grant revelation. Zodiark is a silent god and His scripture is a prescribed set of ablutions for the sake of purity and devotion.

He is loyal. He is the most devout, the worthiest, and he has it in good faith that even the temptations of Azem cannot sway him. The rigors of denial are but a step of the many required for his ascension. Their promises of freedom and indulgence are only dangerous to mortal men. He has no want of their divine light, their false providence, that strange and never-ending tale they weave about a world divided and brought peace.

Zodiark brought salvation unto the Star. It was not them and their stolen mantle who redressed the balance and grappled with a treasonous God. Hydaelyn would see them all crucified for Her own gain, supping on their dreams and aether like a leech and tossing souls about within the Lifestream as if they were naught but toys. Her machinations have seen many of his Brothers and Sisters led down the path of sin. He swears that he will not follow them.

In his wandering and thinking, he meets them─the infernal Azem. They jaunt about with bare feet and a sunbeam smile as if he cannot see the knife they hide behind that cheer. He has no want to be a sacrificial lamb upon the altar of their broken faith.

“Come join me,” they call, stepping over the threshold between the holy halls of his chapel and that of the wilds. Had they been a demon, they would have been stopped long before nearing His domain. “Elidibus, old friend, why do you deny me so?”

He holds his rosary tight enough to ache. “Do not speak to me as if we are associates.”

“Shall I speak to you as a brother? A lover, mayhaps?”

“Nothing,” he snaps. “You will speak to me as nothing. Begone from this place. You are not welcome here.”

They laugh in bell-like tones, soft and musical where it shatters the silence, and do not listen to his words. “I am a traveler, you know. You could leave with me and He would never know.”

Elidibus grinds his teeth, turning away from them to stalk down the hall in hopes that they will leave him be. They simply follow. He is almost unbothered by the dirt they track along the halls when he is fixated on their words.

Why would he leave? What is there to run from? He is the Emissary, the preacher of Truth and Speaker for His will. He has nothing to fear from them.

(And yet a little part of his brain nags about how even Emet-Selch had left to follow them. Their devout Architect around whose ears this very chapel rose had been seduced by Azem's promises. Where is he now? Why has he not come along with them? What has him so busy that he would not only abandon his Shepherd's side, but even that of the chance to get in the way of Elidibus's ascension? He cannot fathom the answer.)

"Elidibus," they say as he opens the door to his chambers, "do remember my offer. I will be back, 'ere long. You stand at a crossroads. Be cautious that you do not choose the wrong path."

And when he closes it behind him, their voice vanishes same as their shadow. He kneels next to his bed and entreats His guidance one word at a time. Whether a crossroads, a crux, or crucifixion, he would have answers.

Emet-Selch, Sorcerer of Eld and Architect of Amaurot, does not finger paint. He sketches and has used gouache more than one, but him? Finger-painting for some ridiculous little festival that damned Exarch has made for the people of the Crystarium? Never. 

The Warrior of Light continues her work as if his criticisms of her art float above her head. She dabs a little more paint on what Emet-Selch thinks might be a flower (or a Flan? Maybe even a radioactive mandragora. He’s never been one for deciphering the doodles of his kin) and pushes hair from her face, smearing a bright line of acrylic across her cheek in the process. 

“My, what a mess you make.” He grimaces at how the paint only smears further when she tries to wipe it off.

She smiles when she replies, “It’s fun. You should try it sometime. Destroying the world and avenging this and that is tough work. Finger-painting is not.”

Emet-Selch sits down on the floor and crosses his legs, slouching nearly more than he does while standing, and very pointedly does not look at the messy palette all too near his right hand. He just watches the Warrior painstakingly dot tiny stamen all over the inside of what he is beginning to realize is a very campy sunflower. He wonders what prompted the usage of indigo instead of yellow, but that could be due to the Warrior’s penchant for purposeful chaos. 

He continues to watch until she sneezes and accidentally flicks paint onto the fur of his robe. He stares at the offending specks of orange in absolute disbelief. “Warrior, tell me,” he asks in his very best attempt at civility, “do you realize what you’ve done?”

She rubs at her nose with one paint-covered hand and looks at his clothing. She squints. “Is that… paint?”

“Yes.”

Her jaw drops. “So you’re joining me?”

Emet-Selch worries that maybe there are more than a few screws loose in her head because he is fuming and all she asked was if he was joining her in making a ridiculous mortal mess of protean art. “You sneezed paint on me,” he clarifies. “Do you understand what that means?”

“Oh. You need a change of clothes?”

He sighs in the most put-upon way he can manage. “Sure,” he says, sarcasm obvious in his tone and the roll of his eyes. “Why not.”

She shuffles over to her wardrobe and pulls out some work clothes, most of which already bearing stains from wear, and tosses a particularly large set of coveralls his way. They are suspiciously close to his size. She then sits back down and gets to work. 

Emet-Selch looks at the fabric in his hands. It wouldn’t do to continue subjecting his clothing to the abuse of being around the Sundered (and paint) and he could surely Create some suitable loungewear with a snap, but… why not wear the clothing the Warrior gave him? Beside the obvious reasons, that is. 

He tugs off his coat and outer robes, stepping into the coveralls and wondering how, exactly, they fit so well considering the Warrior’s own measurements against his own. He barely has time to evaluate whether or not his appearance is satisfactory before the woman in question is patting the floor next to her impatiently. 

“Sit with me!”

He acquiesces and hopes she understands how many of her traits are the same as they were during their days together in Amaurot. The 14th… that their many pieces would be so enduring is balm to his soul. 

She hands him the palette and waits. He blinks. “I do not finger-paint.”

“You can make what you need, yes?” She points at the open spaces throughout her project─a huge fabric banner for the Pendants─and smiles. “I’d appreciate the help.”

He makes a brush without thought, the matrices simpler than things like living beings or clockwork, and says, “I suppose I can assist, given the right incentive.”

“Lyna said she’ll bring lemon wafers over in the afternoon.”

Tearing down the hallowed halls of the Crystal Tower, the Warrior of Light comes to a conclusion. They are utterly, absolutely, magnificently done for. Even should they charge back into the Ocular and demand some manner of magical assistance to fake a fiancée, they still need a fiancée to imitate in the first place. Having an ally who is living and breathing at their side would be of more comfort than a glamoured automaton or strange and incorporeal projection. 

They could always say their fiancée is sick and couldn’t make the trip! Lying is always an option when your troubles stem from a huge misunderstanding of marriage-level proportions! 

But there is also the whip-quick cognition M’aaiho employs when meeting friends of any sort. She and Mamá had known Valeryn was fixing to propose far before she had even forged the ring. The chances of making it through a visit without someone there to physically see it through were null and void. 

They slide around a corner and take the stairs two at a time once they make it out of the Tower, nearly tumbling down to the brickwork in their haste. If they want any chance of putting on a convincing act, they need to talk to Tataru. 

Tataru is of absolutely no help. 

Where they had hoped she may have had some reasonable and/or helpful suggestions as to how the situation needed to go, she had simply fixed them with a flat, disbelieving look. They’d begged. They’d whined. They’d kowtowed. They’d cried into their tea while she balanced the Scions’ expenses and refused any further comment past a brisk, “Well, there is no shortage of choices.” 

Whatever that means. 

“Tataru, please,” they moan, head resting on the table miserably. “M’aaiho is going to look so disappointed if I don’t show up with wife. Or husband. Or… spouse of some assorted flavor.”

“I gave you my two Gil,” she replies, not looking up from her collection of organized parchment charts, “and I know you will prevail. What is the Warrior of Light if not someone who triumphs despite the odds?”

“Me! Just a plain ol’ adventurer who may or may not be guaranteed a one-shot knockout when Mamá frowns all sad-like!”

She sighs, shaking her head. “There is no shortage of choices, as I said. Find someone who you genuinely wish to court and ask them to accompany you. ‘Tis a simple solution. You’ll worry yourself into a stupor, overthinking it so much.”

“But, Tataaaaruuuuuu—“

“No ifs, buts, or ands. Go find someone to court. I am sure it will go better than you think.”

They huff, mumbling, “So I wont get stabbed, but there will be some peripheral murder.”

“Get out there! Go!” she orders, pausing her work to shoo them out of the Seventh Heaven’s back room-turned-headquarters. Had she not been so diminutive, it would have been multiple times more terrifying to see her put her hands on her hips and stand uncompromisingly in front of the entryway. “I’ll not listen to your troubles ‘till you’ve given my advice a try.”

They groan, scrubbing a hand over their face, and walk out of the pub. Mor Dhona has been bustling since the initial influx of adventurers. Despite the majority of Doman refugees having made the journey back to Othard (now liberated and on the way to rehabilitation), there is no shortage of foreign and familiar faces to greet them. 

They spend an entire bell picking through stalls in the small bazaar with intent to procrastinate. It’s so much easier to stare down a knockoff vendor trying to sell them imitation jade for a premium than it is to consider asking someone on a d—da—outing. On an outing. With them. Romantically. 

There is a solid second where they can nearly hear the echo of Tataru’s laugh in the back of their mind. They can’t take the situation seriously. Them? Going out with someone? Unlikely. 

As they had told the Exarch, it isn’t from any lack of want. They just… don’t see what would make them desirable to others. They could likely impose upon an ally to make a play of it, but to find someone who would seriously consider their hand is all but impossible. 

Asking someone like Y’shtola to fake-date them would work out platonically so long as they compensated her with some new material for study or an entire crate of the tea she so adores. Thancred would require childcare arrangements or the introduction of Ryne to their family (which would likely only solidify M’aaiho’s suspicion that they are faking. It is known that they don’t have time to raise a child). The same situation would apply to Urianger. 

Their options of close allies are severely limited. 

After attaining a portion of candied fruit, they sit down on one of the many benches lining the road and try to find some potential options. They tick names off on their fingers until it becomes too much to manage. Rifling through their pack, they find their travelworn pocket book and quill. After fishing about for a small inkpot, they begin constructing a rather disorderly list of candidates. 

The Exarch is busy. Lyna is even more so. The friends they’d made while laying the Warriors of Darkness to rest all have their own lives to attend to. And, as if to make matters worse, anyone they may have a chance with from the First would have to find a way to the Source. 

Ardbert lives in their soul, so they doubt he could pop out to play partners. Then there’s the situation with Emet-Selch and the whole soul-banishing battle, their complete lack of trust in Elidibus, and a very large lack of faith in any Ascian within punching distance no matter how charming and dateable they may be. They have their own motives (understandable as they may be, they are not forgivable) and the Warrior does not think for more than a moment that any of their number would behave well enough to pretend to be their fiancé. 

Of their acquaintances on the Source, many are married or otherwise engaged (in combat, mostly) leaving them with a succinct and messily penned set of people to consider. Looking at the set of names, they wonder how they’ll manage to land a chance at courtship with even one of them. 

Steeling themself, they decide to heed Tataru’s advice and ignore the other options. They need to make it believable and in order to do that, they need to be true to their heart. 

Pocketbook clutched in one hand, they activate a Teleport spell. The purple aether shimmers, lifting them from their seat with a familiar wave of weightlessness. It waits for their command. 

Where will you go?

> Foundation

> Camp Dragonhead

> Reunion

> The Crystarium

> Amaurot

Never let it be said that the Warrior of Light is not challenged. While the might of gods and mortals has grown stale over the years, the affairs of family visitation have not. If anything, they’ve become more perilous than ever, the Warrior’s found family of sorts clamoring for dinner together, a letter, for them to answer their linkpearl without sounds of battle and death ringing through the line. They would love to visit and take a day (read: week) off, but even with everything settled between the Source and its inhabitants, there is work to be done. They simply do not have the time.

“Visit us soon, my star! Valeryn has been working on that shawl you sent her the pattern for and wants to show it to you. Her skill has improved by leaps and bounds, as of late.”

“Yes, Mamá,” they agree, knee-deep in swamp water and covered very thoroughly in mud, “I will visit as soon as I am able. Could I possibly bring my f—what the hell?” The line erupts into static, crackling snatches of speech filtering through with no incoherence to be found, they wait, face scrunched up in discomfort. It isn’t like they can remove the earpiece when their hands are nearly more dirt than skin. 

“—did I hear that right? A f—“

“Yes? Mamá, the transmission isn’t clear. I can’t hear you. Can I call you back once I’m back in Ul’dah?” 

They wait for an answer and slog through the water all the while, searching, searching, finally. It only took them an annoyingly long time, but they’d found a good few baby morbols. Now, all that’s left is to kill off the parent and bring a couple babies back to the coliseum. They listen to the static even while aether drips from their hands and makes the water bubble as if ready to boil, the fight over in seconds and quarry acquired in less than a minute afterward. 

They’re halfway back to their chocobo when the line clears again.

“Am I coming through?”

“Yes, Mamá,” they reply. “Did you hear me earlier?”

There’s the sound of excited giggling and then about three voices speaking all at once, layering over each other when they say, “Your fiancée, right?” and “Congratulations!” 

“I said my friend, Mamá—“

The woman on the line laughs brightly. “No need to be shy about it now, my star. You shine so bright it was only a matter of time before someone saw it too!”

They groan, scrubbing a hand over their face and regretting it the moment mud gets in their mouth and nearly into their eyes. “It’s not like that—“

“Did you hear that, M’aaiho? They proposed!”

“Mamá! You’re misunderstanding!”

“Bring them to dinner when you visit,” Mamá invites (or, as anyone with a particularly opinionated parent would say: orders). “They need to meet the family!”

The Warrior sighs. This is a battle they will never win. “Okay,” they acquiesce, “but only dinner.”

“Not even dessert?”

“Dessert, too,” they agree, thinking of the pastries Mamá and M’aaiho made last time they visited. Those had been heavenly.

Cheers crackle loudly in their ear, but for the sake of pastries, they will prevail! For food! For the sweet taste of saffron syrup! For their stomach Eorzea!

They regret agreeing about five hours later when Thancred nails them with a look of absolute disbelief and says, “Wow, I have been surprised by you many a time, but this is… new.”

The Warrior gestures wildly, agitated to the point of breaking their usual habits of excessive nodding and stoic wall-staring, as if their frenzied hand-flapping will get the point across without words. 

“So, what are you going to do about it?”

They open their mouth, close it, open it again and get out a vague squeaking noise. Whatever part of their brain that is in charge of speech has clocked out early and left them to flounder, unsure of how to verbalize the radical thought of “I need a fake fiancée who is convincing enough that they’ll be able to convince M’aaiho we’re a thing while also being someone I trust enough that them being affectionate like we’re courting won’t make me want to crawl into the Crystal Tower and die from embarrassment or discomfort.”

“Need a minute?”

They nod violently enough Thancred fears for their neck. 

“Okay. Take your time. I have until—“ he glances at one of the chronometers within their inn room “—a bit past eight. Give or take a few minutes, we have an entire bell.”

They take a moment to try and calm down, bouncing their legs and cycling through ideas before coming to a seemingly flawless conclusion. “Thancred, I need you to fake date me.”

Thancred, to his benefit, does not laugh. He instead smiles genially and asks, “And you would not see my hand severed from my arm should I place it on your hip?”

The Warrior pauses, thinks, and replies, “Now that you put it that way, I need someone who isn’t as forward.” 

“So that leaves… Urianger, possibly?”

“Does he even have a romantic bone in his body?”

Thancred huffs half a laugh. “You would be surprised. Antiquated speech aside, he is quite good with women.”

“Need I remind you that I am nowhere near his type,” they say, “nor particularly capable of decoding his prose.”

“His hands do a lot of talking,” he answers, as if that is not terribly misleading and otherwise incriminating evidence of their nearly-joint-parenthood of Ryne. 

They raise a brow. “Do they now?”

It is only by the grace of Lyna’s intervention that Thancred is saved a well-intentioned ribbing. “The Exarch asks for your presence, Warrior.”

“And he will have it in but a moment. The Ocular, as usual?”

“Aye,” she agrees. “I will inform him forthwith.”

Thancred stands from his seat and stretches. “Back to work for both of us. Do tell if you’re departing to world yet unseen.”

They nod and stand from where they’d been half collapsed on their bed. In a shift of stance, barely even a half-second, they have gone from their civvies to adventuring gear. “Be safe, Thancred,” they say, tacking on, “and do not tell Urianger about this! I would die before the fae let me live it down!”

“Good luck with your fiancée,” he replies, striding out of the room with them close behind. They part ways at the end of the hallway and they jump straight over the railings to skip the stairs on their way to an aethernet crystal. 

“The Ocular, please,” they whisper, and it is done. They flicker into existence in the room itself, the Tower directing them from the well-traveled paths right to where the Exarch needs their presence. “Evening,” they greet. “Finally looks like it, too.”

“Good evening,” he replies, smiling softly as if they could not see it. “I hope my summons did not interrupt your day off.” 

They shrug. “Wasn’t much of one back on the Source, if I am completely honest.” They pause, fiddle with their hands, and ask, “Could I trouble you for your counsel?”

“Always, Warrior. What troubles you?”

“What about─”

He interrupts, sitting down on the steps by the dais and patting the floor beside him. “The matter of summons can wait. Sit and let your troubles be known. You─we have time.”

They sit down with a thump, tension visible in the way their shoulders are drawn tight despite the looseness of their facial expression. “I need a fiancée.”

“You are… to be married?”

“A fake one! Not a, um, real fiancée,” they amend, voice wavering. They stare at their pants and pick at a loose thread. “I would like to court someone, but I fear my life being what it is… you know?” They laugh hollowly, scars on their hands and callousing making something like holding hands or touching someone softly feel foreign, not for them. “I am not exactly desirable, see, and there’s nothing I can do to take away what marks I bear that would make me whole again.”

They very clearly do not just mean the many deep grooves cut into their skin. Being the savior to Eorzea, the Source, the First, to him, the Crystal Exarch knows how much it can take away from a person. However, he thinks no less of them for it. If anything, he thinks more. 

“Maybe to a coward,” he replies arily. “Not like someone who knows of your boundless devotion.”

“Was that a hint of G’raha I heard there?”

The Exarch flusters. Even with his hood down and identity known, to hear his name curling off their tongue once more is too much! Spare him, oh Warrior of Light! “I... forgive me. That was likely strange of me to say─”

“It was nice,” they say, sigh turning to a smile toward the end. “Thank you, Exarch.”

He redirects the conversation shortly thereafter, seeking to avoid further embarrassment for want of a better verbal filter, and learns of the situation in full shortly thereafter. He cannot even find it in himself to be surprised when they groan and flop backward to lay fully on the crystal floor. 

“I have no words.”

They gesture as is to say “and you think I do?” before groaning. “I can’t believe I let my craving for jalebi win me over.”

“It must be good, if you’d brave the waters of betrothal for it,” he comments. “Why not think of it as an adventure?”

They sit up fast enough he can hear their back crack (ouch) and place their hands on his shoulders, leaning in. He panics at their closeness for all of a second before remembering, this is the Warrior of Light. This is the person who once went seven months while being actively courted by the head of House Borel before they were spirited away to Doma, subsequently breaking the courtship off without knowing what it was. They are just affectionate and endearing and very, very close. 

“I love you, G’raha Tia.”

And this is just another mode of devastation, he supposes, when they lean in a little further and hug him fiercely as if to physically shove all their emotions into him. His ears ring and he flicks them as if to get rid of the echoes of “I love you” by force and subconscious reaction. 

They release him, stand, and say, “I am so sorry, but I need to go and I need to go now! I had an epiphany!”

Within a breath, they are gone and he is left alone in the Ocular. He presses hands to his cheeks and allows himself to flush. Ye gods, do they even know how many would kill for the chance to so much as play at being within their sights? Sending a desperate prayer to Hydaelyn, he hopes this will end well. Given their track record, however, he sincerely doubts it.